And some more academic texts – Data Mining (a current, excellent, book that’s
a duplicate), Optoelectronics, Engineering Mathematics, Quantum Physics,
Neural Networks, Calculus, Vector Analysis. Some of them are old (1950s) but
still relevant (and the “revised” editions are still published as standard
texts).

If you want anything drop me a line (steve@blighty.com) in the next week or so
and I’ll put it to one side, if we’re likely to run into each other in the next
couple of months. If you’re really excited by something I’d consider mailing it.
Everything else is getting recycled.

Bring the coconut milk to a simmer and stir in the garlic and chile paste,
add the onion and the bok choi stems and simmer for 15 minutes. Add the
bok choi leaves, season and simmer for another 2 minutes. Great with rice.

I’ve spent a couple of days playing with my new Pebble, and I’ve gone
from “I vaguely remember C, I guess” to “I have a finished app, in the
Pebble app store”.

It’s been very satisfying to complete something from start to finish, something
that seldom happens in my professional life.

So what did I build? It’s an app that lets you select a type of tea from a
list, tells you how much leaf tea you should use and what temperature of
water, then runs a countdown timer so that you brew it for the right length
of time. When your tea is ready, it vibrates.

Pebble-the-company are announcing something at CES tomorrow, probably their
new 2.0 OS and it’s associated app store ecosystem – so I decided to sign
up for an app store account and publish it. They’re geared up for commercial
developers, so they required some marketing banners and other collateral. Yay
for Photoshop, Illustrator and some stock icons.

The app store isn’t live yet, but the whole thing is available from
my github page.

It’s a nice bit of hardware – eInk display, 80MHz ARM CPU, three axis
accelerometer and bluetooth to connect to a phone, all in less than 50 grammes.

Out of the box it has some fancy watch faces and the ability to display
notifications from apps running on the phone, so inbound SMS or facebook
updates display on the watch.

But it also has a fairly decent SDK
that lets you develop native apps to run on the watch in C, and talk to either
native phone apps or portable javascript apps hosted by the phone, to give
a configuration UI and to get access to geolocation and web services.

Half an hour in I have “hello world” running on it. This might be interesting –
though it’s been years since I’ve written more than a few lines of C.

ISO 8601 is the ISO standard
format for timestamps. It looks like “2013-08-27T10:30:00Z”, where the “T” is
a separator between the date and time, and the “Z” stands for the UTC timezone.

It’s not often used in end user visible text, but it’s
a decent format to use for data interchange, metadata and microformats. As
just one example timeago.js uses it to render
HTML5-style tags as fuzzy timestamps (e.g. “4 minutes ago”).

If we’re pulling timestamps from PostgreSQL then we can use
to_char()
to render them in whatever format we like.